Mitchell

Granted I'm fairly new to crosswords, but I found this to be the most difficult Sunday NYT puzzle I've ever encountered. A Sunday-sized puzzle with Saturday-level difficulty. My issue with the puzzle wasn't the theme, or difficult-to-decipher puns. It was the sheer number of obscure answers that I'd never heard of, many in close proximity to each other, rending whole sections of the grid impossible for me to complete. Pewit? Uppish? Catsear? Arum? Acela? Arikara? This wasn't like some challenging Friday or Saturday puzzles where I could work at it and reason my way to solutions that depend on idioms, puns, or clever word constructions. It was more like an obscure vocabulary test that covers a whole lot of words I've never encountered before, and probably never will again, even in the crosswords.

I'm having a hard time articulating why I really don't like this puzzle. I think it's not only the complexity of the bidirectional rebus, it's that the order of the rebus solution varies by square with seemingly no rhyme or reason. If there was a consistent pattern, like EI always applying to the across answer and IE always applying to the down answer... well, I still wouldn't have solved it without heavy use of the 'reveal' function, but I could have at least picked up on the pattern and solved some of the rest of the rebus-adjacent clues. Overall, I found this puzzle needlessly difficult, the sort of puzzle I couldn't reason my way to, and even when shown the answers, felt no "Ah-ha! I get it!" moment, but rather, "Oh."

Reading through these comments, I'm amazed at how many people can stand to do a crossword on a tiny screen without a keyboard. My eyes and patience would be worn out trying to do a crossword on my phone.